But even if all the self-help advice in the world tells us it’s a good thing, saying ‘Yes’ to life can be harder than it sounds.
It was three days since Charlie had split up with Sara, and at last he was beginning to feel more like himself. In the latter stages of their being together, Charlie had begun to wonder if this was it: this boring, unadventurous person, whose only desires in life were Sara and iPlayer – this was who he was now. He couldn’t even be bothered to download a Torrent, that was how bad it had got. He was stuck with whatever crap came up under ‘Entertainment’ or ‘Sport’. To discover that this wasn’t him at all, but simply a side effect of their relationship, was an incredible relief.
It was as if, for a year and a half, he’d been plagued by a heinous, bulging spot. He’d prodded it, fingered it, worried it, making it ever redder and angrier. Finally, he’d accepted it as part of himself: a shit part but one he’d have to live with. Then one day, he’d got up and squeezed it – and now it was gone.
In a burst of vitality and decisiveness, Charlie forged three resolutions, three things he had to do before uni ended.
First – really last, but most inescapable – was uni work. Finals were in a month and a half, a month and three-quarters, if you didn’t count Contemporary Italian Politics, which was so easy it didn’t need revising. He had loads of time, and at least in exams, the task was clear. The job was not to fail. Not failing meant getting a 2:1.
There were only four possible grades at uni: First, 2:1, 2:2 and Third, roughly translated as Excellent, Average, Worse Than Average and What Went Wrong? There was no Better Than Average, so the Better Than Average student could drift along taking in nothing and handing in shoddy work cobbled together from Google, Wikipedia and the set text. It was a stupid, inefficient system, but right now Charlie was grateful. If his calculations were correct (these days he needed a calculator to do times tables past two), the minimum result he needed from his next five modules to secure a 2:1 was 63 per cent. Surely, surely, he could manage that.
Charlie’s second aim was to improve what he laughingly called his ‘career prospects’. Not to find a job – there was no need to go overboard. Not to apply for a job – he had exams to do after all. If he had the time, Charlie supposed, it might be a good idea to find a summer internship or two to buff up the old CV – again, that was more than strictly necessary. All that was really required was to clarify in some way his future direction. Even with the bar set this low, Charlie had so far contrived to dip under it. But that was his old self – his new self, his real self, was much more active. Instead of daydreaming about being an entrepreneur, he was going to do something about it. This time next year, he would have his own start-up. He wrapped that promise to his heart with ten layers of mental sticky tape.
Third, and most important, Charlie intended to have an awesome time. This was the student’s other task, in many ways the only task, because if you were having an awesome time, all your other failures were irrelevant. Spent your summers pissing around instead of doing internships? ‘Yeah, but I had an awesome time.’ Forgot to hand in your essay? ‘It’s okay, because I was having an awesome time.’ And failing in this area was so much more humiliating. How could you fail to have an awesome time at uni, where everything was set up to enable that outcome? It was ‘the university experience’. They even put it in the prospectus.
Charlie solemnly vowed to make up for the fun he’d missed when he was being boring with Sara. Of course, fun wasn’t something you could put on a To Do list – you couldn’t schedule it in, it didn’t work like that. But what he could do was be more spontaneous, open to new things: he could say ‘Yes’ to life, instead of ‘Do I have to?’ That is, if life remembered he existed.
‘You’re just throwing money at the problem,’ said Charlie, surveying Alistair’s stationery binge. ‘Have you got shares in Rymans or what?’
By way of reply, Alistair purposefully slotted highlighters into his desk tidy. He’d cleared the shelf above to make way for an absurd number of refill pads.
‘You know they don’t give marks based on number of trees used?
‘You’re not having any, if that’s what you’re getting at.’
‘I can hardly buy more. Someone’s got to offset your carbon footprint.’
Charlie had invested a lot of time and energy in making his resolutions, but so far putting them into action was proving a challenge. The only thing Alistair was saying ‘yes’ to was a revision schedule that doubled as an advanced torture technique. His three-part, colour-coded plan was pinned to the wall by his bed – the first thing he’d see in the morning, the last thing he’d see at night.
‘Are you really going to work in here then?’
Alistair nodded. ‘You know what the library’s like.’
‘Won’t you go a bit stir crazy? There isn’t even a window.’
Alistair raised an eyebrow. ‘Where are you going to work?’
‘Not sure yet.’ Charlie considered. ‘I’ve got to suss it out, get a feel for a place. Maybe a café?’
Alistair furrowed his brow doubtfully, focusing on his ringbinder labels.
‘Hey.’ In a flash of optimism, Charlie levered himself off the floor to poke Alistair with his foot. ‘You don’t fancy a final pre-revision Rehab Wednesday, for old time’s sake?’
‘Rehab? It’ll be full of first years.’
‘Exactly.’
Alistair made a face. ‘It’s practically grooming.’
After almost three years of living together, the question of who Alistair might be even slightly interested in having sex with was still a mystery to Charlie. For a long time he’d been sure Alistair had a thing for their housemate Romilly, but if he did, it clearly wasn’t urgent enough for him to do anything about it. The same applied to his possible gayness (was he hiding it from himself or just from everyone else?). Until the mystery unravelled itself, the only sensible option was to assume that Alistair was completely void of sexuality, a slightly less human version of Kryten, the robot butler in Red Dwarf.
‘A drink then.’
‘I’m not drinking this semester.’
‘All right, all right.’ Charlie threw up his hands and made for the door. ‘I’ll leave you to your labelling.’ He slouched down the stairs, rejected. ‘See you in June.’
In the kitchen–living room, Katie and Romilly were sprawled on the sticky faux-leather sofa. Katie read aloud from a magazine: ‘. . . conjunction of Mars and Venus makes for an explosive outlook on the relationship front—’
‘Oooh.’
‘No, I think that’s bad.’ In her free hand, Katie held a soup spoon full of peanut butter, the tub clamped between her knees. ‘Your energies may be pulled between the demands of home and career.’
‘Career! LOL.’
Charlie threw himself into the spongy armchair. ‘So. What are you guys doing tonight?’
Romilly was flattening her fringe with the heel of her hand. ‘Josh is coming over and we’re watching The Apprentice.’
Charlie sighed deeply.
‘Oh, sor-reee. You weren’t even invited.’
‘Obviously I have nothing better to do.’
‘Thought so.’
‘Ben’s with Clare. Lucas is out with the football team. Alistair’s in with his stationery.’ Charlie shook his head. ‘To be honest, I’ve got no idea what I used to do. There’s so much time in the day. The last thing I want to do is start revising, but that leaves about fourteen hours a day thinking about not revising.’
‘You all right?’ asked Katie, between licks of the spoon.
‘I’m fine,’ he said bravely. ‘I suppose I just miss Sara, that’s all.’ Charlie was rather hoping they might suggest bowling, or a trip to the pub, or some kind of outing in Romilly’s car to cheer him up.
‘Well, if you want to know how she is’ – Romilly jerked her head towards her laptop – ‘Penny’s doing live heartbreak coverage in Facebook statuses.’ She frowned. ‘Facebook sta
ti?’
Charlie’s stomach flipped. ‘Like what? What’s she’s saying?’
Romilly rolled her eyes. ‘Oh, you know.’ She simpered: ‘“How do some people still look so gorgeous even when they’re crying?” Here, I’ll show you.’
‘Oh God, no no no,’ Charlie cringed. ‘Keep it away.’
‘Penny’s bloody awful, isn’t she?’ said Katie.
‘Yes.’
‘Completely.’
Charlie had a horrible vision of Sara being dragged out, fed with shots, and persuaded to ‘get back in the game’. ‘Sara’s not going to Rehab, is she? Actually, don’t tell me, don’t tell me.’
Romilly gave him a shrewd look. ‘To be honest, I still don’t get why you broke up—’
‘No, we’re not going through this again,’ Charlie announced firmly. ‘I can’t take any more dissecting.’ He slipped down in his chair, deflated. ‘I can’t even relax when I’m watching The Apprentice lately. I start worrying about my bloody “career”.’
‘Oh, I worry about that all the time,’ said Katie. ‘On the inside, I’ve got this constant, tiny scream.’ She held her fingers to her cheeks in a miniaturised impression of the painting, letting out a high, thin ‘Aaaaah!’
‘Can you at least text Josh and get him to bring some beers?’ Charlie moaned. ‘To help me feel like less of a failure?’
‘Fine. As a special concession to Charlie’s pathetic state,’ Romilly reached for her phone, ‘I’ll make Josh bring me white wine.’
From the second Justin rolled off the mattress and said, casually, ‘Maybe we should fold the futon up today,’ Ellie knew the holiday was over.
Since the institution of the Total Denial Policy about F****s and the d**********n, they’d been hiding out at Justin’s, watching episodes of Dexter, smoking weed, having sex and eating various combinations of egg and toast. Ellie had never intended this to be a permanent state. What she’d really wanted was one of those calm interludes that happen just after the middle of an action film, when the hero takes sanctuary in a cool, tree-lined nunnery or a network of caves inhabited by friendly, wisdom-dispensing thieves. She’d wanted a moment of peace before charging into battle with renewed vigour and (possibly) a vital insight that would eventually save her life. Ellie had always known the respite would end, but now the end was nigh, she didn’t feel up to donning her sword and galloping back out there. What she felt like doing was weeping quietly and having her hair stroked by a stern but kindly nun.
‘It’ll be like rolling over a rock.’ Justin pulled on a Lou Reed 2006 Tour T-shirt. ‘There’ll be woodlice and everything.’
Justin’s house was past Morrisons, over the railway bridge, beside the Iceland where hope went to die. (Hope, ever hopeful, wanted to be cryogenically frozen like Walt Disney and revived when technology caught up.) The area was so far off the uni map that, to the average undergrad, its existence was almost offensive. It implied what surely could not be true, that people their age, students at elite universities, grew up to be the sort of people who lived out here in ITV-land, in a semi-detached house down the road from the golf club with – if they were lucky – a little pebbled water feature in the front garden.
In the middle of this suburban chorus line, Justin’s place stuck out like a toothless crone, its bricks blackened and crumbling, one top-floor window boarded up, the other rheumy and weeping. Once, way before Ellie arrived, the house had been a squat. Now there was some agreement with the owner, who lived in Peru with his much younger Peruvian wife, two-year-old boy and newborn baby. (Shafiq, the house organiser, got the updates on Facebook.) Even though it was inhabited, the house maintained an almost Victorian sense of abandonment. Inside, each door was like a portal to a parallel universe. Housemates had come and gone over the years, each one leaving their mark: a partially knocked-through wall, a spiralling purple and gold mural, a series of crusty scorch marks on the carpet by the bed. In one of the empty rooms upstairs (too damp to occupy), old computer parts were laid out in a twisting pattern on the floor, as if they were being used to summon a demon.
Justin headed downstairs – ‘I’ve got a different way of poaching I want to try’ – leaving Ellie alone, listening to Mattie take his midday shower and imagining his obscure postgraduate thoughts. Towards the end of last term he had declared, out of the blue, ‘Speaking is writing – that’s what my thesis is about! As well as sound engineering.’ He was shy but fiercely independent, ever alert to the first hint of house bureaucracy, such as Shafiq’s request that he sometimes bought loo roll. Most of the housemates had started uni with Justin, and were by now training to be psychiatric nurses or volunteering in co-op cafés. As far as Ellie could tell, the only thing they held in common was a total commitment to foraging from skips; if they got the call, they’d drop whatever they were doing, travel to a distant suburb and spend the afternoon carrying a wardrobe or a perfectly functional swing-top bin back to the house. They were like a squadron of superheroes whose shambolic daily lives were merely a cover for their incredible powers of furniture salvage.
Precedent had it that Ellie’s next task was to get Dexter downloading so they could watch it as they ate breakfast, kicking off another beautiful day in three square metres of paradise. She turned on Justin’s LINUX-operated laptop (hers had started death-rattling just from running Word) and went onto Pirate Bay. But some feeling, something she didn’t want to name, had crept in, insinuating itself through the gaps in the floorboards. Ellie didn’t draw the light-blocking curtain that Justin had found, washed in the bath and carefully pinned to the ceiling. (He was a bad sleeper.) She climbed resolutely back into bed.
Justin pushed open the door and stood with his back against it, holding the plates. ‘Shit, sorry Shafiq, I haven’t paid it yet. I completely forgot.’
Instinctively, Ellie curled up, retreating from the voice outside: the mere sight of Shafiq, or Ganna, or Luke, or Mattie, or Mattie’s boyfriend Ed, would be enough to break the spell. Avoiding people was a crucial part of the Total Denial Policy, implemented with painstaking care. Showers were – naturally – out of the question. These last few days, Ellie had been waiting for absolute silence before she risked venturing out to the loo. Sometimes she’d found herself bemoaning how hard it was for women to pee in a bottle.
‘Vinegar didn’t seem to make any difference.’ Justin closed the door, restoring the vital airlock, and Ellie pushed herself up to sit against the wall. He carefully handed her a plate and set his on the table he’d made last year from an old door. ‘Aren’t we watching Dexter?’ He nodded at his laptop.
Justin was feeling it too, Ellie could tell. She felt a flash of irritation at his thought crime. ‘What did you do to the eggs?’
Justin allowed himself a tiny, proud smile. ‘Thyme.’
The kitchen downstairs had the look of a long-disputed territory, where a tenacious black mould fought with tacky nicotine-stain-coloured grease for sovereignty over all surfaces, cupboards and utilities. Bottles of chilli sauce and vinegar huddled against the wall, refugees displaced by the fray. The sole exception was Justin’s section – a neatly wiped-down patch of blue, above a well-organised cupboard containing three types of lentils, rock salt and a tin of anchovies.
‘Well, before we sink back into the life of a psychopathic cop, there’s actually something I want to talk to you about.’ Justin brushed his fingers through his hair. ‘An idea I’ve had.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ said Ellie, guardedly. She burst the yolk of her egg and watched it ooze onto the bread. Even the word ‘idea’ was in danger of breaching the Total Denial Policy. Was Justin about to bring up some thought about Modernism or the Renaissance or exam technique? ‘Nice eggs.’
‘So it’s about what to do after uni.’ She looked up in surprise. Justin had put his plate aside and was rubbing his palms on his thighs, fingers trembling with nervous energy. ‘I was thinking that what I’d like to do . . .’ He anchored his gaze on a damp patch on the ceiling, as if reciting something
learned by heart. ‘I think what I’d really like to do is run my own café.’
‘Oh wow!’
Justin flushed with relief. ‘And,’ he hurried on, ‘I was thinking the best way to do that would be to stay here, and start working with Luke and maybe eventually I’d get somewhere of my own or we’d set up together or something like that.’
‘Okay, yeah,’ Ellie nodded. ‘You’re really good at this stuff.’
Justin pressed his lips together, turned up at the edges, like a toddler who had seen smiling on the TV and was trying to do it the grown-up way.
Ellie’s phone chimed a text, a familiar sound she couldn’t place at first. She started fumbling around the bed. ‘And that sounds like a good plan. Do-able. I think it’s brilliant!’ Ever since they’d been going out – and long before – uni had been dragging Justin down, constantly demanding that he adapt himself to analysis and argument and referencing guidelines. Being the grafter he was, Justin had strived repeatedly and with all his might to become the thing they wanted, only to produce barely passable essays that managed to feel both plodding and baffling, even after Ellie had corrected them. She had never known it otherwise. All the useful things he was good at, like making stuff or feeding people, went for nothing, as if they were slightly embarrassing distractions from the real task of pointing out that such-and-such was a tautology or so-and-so contradicted herself. Ellie could see him doing this, and even being happy. For a moment she felt jealous.
‘Oh, it’s Nadine. I said I’d meet her tomorrow.’ Ellie sniffed her own armpit. ‘Wow. Maybe I should have a practice shower – get back into the swing of it.’ She crammed an enormous forkful of eggy toast into her mouth and clambered out of bed.
Confidence Page 6